Licensing Changes for Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises

Starting from October’s launch of the new version of Dynamics NAV, called Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises, Microsoft has made some changes regarding licensing policy and in this article we want to inform our customers and all who are interested about the changes made.

For previous versions Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 included, it has been available the perpetual licensing model with concurrent users. License for concurrent users allows for the customer to purchase a number of users who can access the application in the same time, and there is no need to define exactly who will be the users who have the right to access the application.

In Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises the licensing will be available just for named users, who must be clearly defined, and concurrent users model will disappear. If customers are within an active “Enhancement Plan” and want to migrate from a previous version of Dynamics NAV (Navision) to Dynamics Business Central (D365 BC) there will be a conversion of concurrent users to named users at a ratio which is cost-effective for customer.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2018 will be available for sale just till 01.04.2018, so if you want to buy or to upgrade to Dynamics NAV 2018 using the old way of licensing, you can do it just for couple months from now on.

Customers who already have Dynamics NAV 2018 or any previous version will be able to purchase licenses for the system they have using the licensing model available at the moment of the initial acquisition.

Some changes have been made to functionalities packs also, there are no more Starter Pack and Extended Pack, but Essentials Pack and Premium Pack. This is good news, because Essentials Pack has more functionalities than Starter Pack, so is much more likely that one customer to opt in just for the functionalities of this package, at a better price.

Another good news is the fact that licensing in Dynamics Business Central on-premises can be made now starting from a single user, while before that you had to purchase three users at least.

There are also other changes, some of them are quite technical and therefore, for any other question related to this topic, do not hesitate to contact us!